Also, you should register here if you want a chance at playing the beta (whenever that is).

Wow. This looks killer. Truly does.I have always loved this visual style, and this is without any doubt by far the best implementation I have seen in any game with this style. The lighting is just insane.

Thanks for the link to register. I figured you already had signed up, so I put you down as the referrer.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s fairly common knowledge that you’re using the Project Offset engine to fuel the graphics behind your game. How did you make the decision to use that particular engine? Are you worried about the system requirements being too high for the common gamer to enjoy the title?

Kern: We love the graphics quality of the Offset engine, but we knew going into this project that no matter what engine we licensed, none of them were really set up to run an MMO. Offset is an extremely flexible engine and it's built to accommodate our changes and specific, unique needs. The fact that the Offset team was local was an added bonus; it's been very easy for us to work together.

We've actually ended up with a highly customized version of the Offset engine. For example, we've written our own terrain rendering system, editors, UI systems, networking layers, AI, etc. We've even reorganized the main render loop to be specific to our game, and implemented our own skinning system to allow us to draw large numbers of players on screen. We've also integrated Natural Motion's animation system, Morpheme, for our character animation, and Havok for our physics. It's not unlike what Valve ended up doing when they customized the Quake engine for the original Half-Life.

The end goal is to be smart about what graphics features you end up using, because you definitely want to be able to have lots of gamers be able to play your game. Look sharp, be playable.

To be honest, I thought they were using a heavily-modified version of Unreal Engine 3.

Wow. This looks killer. Truly does.I have always loved this visual style, and this is without any doubt by far the best implementation I have seen in any game with this style. The lighting is just insane.

Thanks for the link to register. I figured you already had signed up, so I put you down as the referrer.